Are infants with autism socially engaged? A study of recent retrospective parental reports.

Researchers asked parents to look back at their baby’s first year. They compared 19 social behaviors in infants later diagnosed with autism and infants with typical development.

Parents filled out the DAISI interview, a checklist that asks about smiling, eye contact, and shared sounds.

Parents of babies later diagnosed with autism reported clear gaps in 16 of the 19 behaviors. These gaps showed up before the first birthday.

Typical babies were described as looking when their name was called, sharing sounds, and smiling back. The autism group rarely did these things.

Lemcke et al. (2013) saw almost no early signs in a big Danish cohort. The difference is simple: they asked the whole population, while Pilgrim et al. (2000) only looked at families already in clinics. Clinic families remember bigger gaps because the problems were already clear.

Goodwin et al. (2019) asked the same question about kids diagnosed at school age. Even those late-diagnosed children had subtle early social gaps, just smaller than the infant group.

Klusek et al. (2015) reviewed nine very-early intervention studies. They found that parent reports like DAISI help pick babies for help before age two, even though more work is still needed.

You can trust a parent’s memory when red flags are strong. Use the DAISI interview any time a caregiver says, “She never looked at me.” If several social items are missing, start teaching eye contact, name response, and shared sounds right away. Early action beats waiting for rituals or language loss to appear.